MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen has ridiculed the ‘hottest year’ claims. “The uncertainty here is tenths of a degree. When someone points to this and says this is the warmest temperature on record, what are they talking about? It’s just nonsense. This is a very tiny change period,” Lindzen said. “If you can adjust temperatures to 2/10ths of a degree, it means it wasn’t certain to 2/10ths of a degree.”

It’s that time of year again, the annual media ritual of declaring the previous year “the hottest ever!” And as usual, the media and many activists government scientists are playing fast and loose with the temperature data and.

But scientists seemed to yawn at the news. Extreme Weather expert Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. noted that the media “hottest year” scare stories are simply not working. “Selling climate policy on “hottest year ever” hard because 2016 also had very low disasters & record high crop productivity. It doesn’t scare people,” Pielke wrote.

Hottest year claims? Media Ignores The Satellite Record Showing No Warming Since 1998 – Climate data analyst Paul Homewood: ‘There must be something wrong with my old eyes, as I can’t seem to find any mention of the satellite record, which shows no such thing. To recap, both UAH and RSS say that atmospheric temperatures for 2016 statistically tied with 1998, at just 0.02C higher. Neither 2014 or 2015 were anywhere near being a record.’ ‘Satellite measurements of global temperatures are regarded as much more comprehensive, accurate and unaffected by UHI, as Roy Spencer explained in 2014.’

Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry: “2015 and 2016 were years with a very strong El Niño.” – “Examination of the satellite data record of atmospheric temperatures, 2016 was only 0.02 degrees Celsius warmer than 1998 — a difference that is not statistically significant,” Curry wrote to the Washington Post today.

Climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke Sr., a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado-Boulder, rejected the way global temperatures are measured. “Unfortunately, the surface temperature analysis contains several uncertainties and systematic biases when used to diagnose global warming,” Pielke Sr. wrote in the Washington Post.

“One of them is with respect to land minimum temperatures over land. Rather than measuring changes in heat content through depth in the atmosphere, even slight changes in vertical mixing of heat (even with no net heating) can produce warmer minimum temperatures,” he wrote.

Motl noted: “Both satellite-based teams quantifying the global mean temperature (UAH AMSU, RSS AMSU) concluded that 2016 was 0.02 °C warmer than 1998. These were otherwise very similar “end of a strong El Niño years” separated by 18 years. According to these numbers and nothing else, one could estimate that the warming per century is some 0.11 °C, a negligible amount.”

He added: “There is no ‘canonical’ global mean temperature. It’s an artificial quantity whose detailed value – and whose detailed change in 18 or 100 years – significantly depends on all the details about how the global mean temperature is defined and measured.”

Meteorologist Joe Bastardi ‏noted: “MOST OF THE WARMING IS IN THE POLAR REGIONS, MANLY IN WINTERS. VERY LITTLE WARMING WHERE MOST HUMANS LIVE ( UNDER .1C).”

Climatologist Dr. John Christy, professor of atmospheric science, University of Alabama in Huntsville: “As the world cools now, the global atmospheric temperature change from February to December has been over one degree. 2017 will be cooler than 2016.”

While 2005, 2010, and 2015, 2016 were declared the ‘hottest years’ by global warming proponents, a closer examination revealed that the claims were “based on year-to-year temperature data that differs by only a few HUNDREDTHS of a degree to tenths of a degree Fahrenheit – differences that were within the margin of error in the data.” In other words, global temperatures have essentially held very steady with no sign of acceleration. The media and climate activists hype ‘record’ temperatures that are not even outside the margin of error of the dataset as somehow meaningful.

MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen ridiculed ‘hottest year’ claims in 2015. “The uncertainty here is tenths of a degree. When someone points to this and says this is the warmest temperature on record, what are they talking about? It’s just nonsense. This is a very tiny change period,” Lindzen said. “If you can adjust temperatures to 2/10ths of a degree, it means it wasn’t certain to 2/10ths of a degree.”

So-called ‘hottest year’ claims are just a fancy way of saying that the ‘global warming pause’ has essentially continued.

The Pause Lives on: Global Satellites: 2016 not Statistically Warmer than 1998 – Climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer: The resulting 2016 annual average global temperature anomaly is +0.50 deg. C, which is (a statistically insignificant) 0.02 deg. C warmer than 1998 at +0.48 deg. C. We estimate that 2016 would have had to be 0.10 C warmer than 1998 to be significantly different at the 95% confidence level. Both 2016 and 1998 were strong El Nino years.

Dr David Whitehouse: ‘Any estimate of temperature trends that have their endpoint on the uptick of the El Nino curve will give a misleadingly high trend. It is obvious that a better trend will be obtained after the natural El Nino has ended. Likewise care must be taken if the start point is near the La Nina years of 1999-2000. The temperature trends of the oceans estimated by the new paper fall into this trap.’

As Roy Spencer has pointed out, the margin of error is 0.1C, so statistically 2016 is tied with 1998 as the warmest year in the satellite record. The fact that there has been no warming for the last 18 years is a massive blow to the credibility of climate science.

Even former NASA climatologist James Hansen admitted ‘hottest year’ declarations are “not particularly important.” MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen ridiculed ‘hottest year’ claims in 2015. “The uncertainty here is tenths of a degree. When someone points to this and says this is the warmest temperature on record, what are they talking about? It’s just nonsense. This is a very tiny change period,” Lindzen said. “If you can adjust temperatures to 2/10ths of a degree, it means it wasn’t certain to 2/10ths of a degree.” 11 So-called ‘hottest year’ claims are just a fancy way of saying that the ‘global warming pause’ has essentially continued.

While 2005, 2010, and 2015 were declared the ‘hottest years’ by global warming proponents, a closer examination revealed that the claims were “based on year-to-year temperature data that differs by only a few HUNDREDTHS of a degree to tenths of a degree Fahrenheit – differences that were within the margin of error in the data.” In other words, global temperatures have essentially held very steady with no sign of acceleration. The media and climate activists hype ‘record’ temperatures that are not even outside the margin of error of the dataset as somehow meaningful.